Bullock (2025) explained that Learning Sciences is an interdisciplinary study of learning, teaching, and how to design effective learning environments and experiences, with the goals of improving educational practices and systems and to shed light on how students learn. The Learning Sciences encompasses a wide variety of views on what constitutes learning and how to design effective educational environments.

For example, Learning Sciences looks at ways to leverage technology to enhance learning outcomes.

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa (2021) in her video presentation “What is Learning Sciences?” explains that Learning Sciences looks at the general concepts of how we organize learning endeavours (formally as well as informally) and systems analysis of thinking about how human beings as a whole learn and societal influences on learning outcomes. This includes evaluation processes or accreditation structures that might exist that pass judgement on the quality of learning.

We find in the literature and from my studies and reading that fundamental concepts in learning, such as memory and attention, have been looked at individually through different fields such as Neuroscience or Psychology and so on (Jurow, Tracy, Hotchkiss, & Kirshner, 2012; Schunk, 2012). On the other hand, Learning Sciences  look at the various concepts of learning with a more holistic vision with a multiple lens instead of through a single lens of an individual field such as Neuroscience or Psychology. Some of these are motivation, resilience, executive functions, critical thinking skills, the role of sleep hygiene on learning, mindfulness practices, differentiation, backward design planning and educational structures, flipping the classroom and its influence on on retention and motivation of students, theory of mind, staving off cognitive decline into old age by keeping the brain active, multiliteracies, habits of mind, long term thinking, how to habituate mindsets that create the potential for new learning. Other areas include language policies on a macro level, the knowledge society, emotional intelligence, metacognitive skills, collaboration, Socratic dialogue, student-centered learning activities and authentic problem-based learning activities (Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2021).

For my Assignment #2 in this course I am interested in studying cheating on assignments which is a problem of practice that is plaguing me in my job. As I am reading on the topic of cheating on assignments, I find that I risk getting lost in the literature and this is a broad topic and I am reading widely and reading too much. Sometimes I feel lost, not knowing what to read and what not to read, what would be relevant for my assignment. But certainly I am doing a lot of reading, maybe too much. Then I got the idea to use Learning Sciences to guide my reading on selected topics and asking the question how is this related to cheating on assignments. This helped me greatly as I was able to narrow down the areas that I plan to read about. The topics I select are motivation, critical thinking skills, resilience, habits of mind, knowledge society, 21st century skills, differentiation, backward planning, flipping the classroom, student-centered learning, authentic problem-based learning, and instructional design. Yet, as I progressed through the assignment, I found that these were too much to cover for the assignment, way too much that I can do in the time and space I have available for the assignment. This then becomes something that I will look into in the future.

In my experience, design researchers in the learning sciences tradition are more likely to assume that it is their job to frame and legitimize the goals of a project based on the literature, apply for funds, and then (with cash in hand) seek out partners who are willing to take up a new set of practices endorsed by prior research in other settings . . . if you bring enough resources, you can always find someone willing to work with you . . . . will the community stick by your design after the money has run out? (O’Neill, 2016, p. 490)

It is challenging enough to get support for doing after school extracurricular activities in my school, much less getting funding and support for design research in the classroom.

References

Bullock, S. M. (2025). The Learning Sciences Approach [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved from https://learn.ontariotechu.ca/courses/32126

Jurow, A. S., Tracy, R., Hotchkiss, J. S., & Kirshner, B. (2012). Designing for the Future: How the Learning Sciences Can Inform the Trajectories of Preservice Teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 63(2), 147–160.

O’Neill, D. K. (2016). Understanding Design Research-Practice Partnerships in Context and Time: Why Learning Sciences Scholars Should Learn From Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Approaches to Design-Based Research. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 497–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2016.1226835

Schunk, D. H. (2012). Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. (2021, Sept 15). What are the Learning Sciences? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XtD40PlCqw